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Company Profile

Corvectra, Inc. is a privately held Delaware corporation, born in Silicon Valley in 2012 from the aerospace roots of the Founder’s first venture that began in 2010. After incorporation, the company quickly rallied around growing market validated needs for new medical diagnostic technology. Corvectra’s primary operations are in Denver, Colorado, where we work with the incubators Innosphere and TiE Rockies, and where we collaborate with supportive members of the exponentially growing medical technology and digital health innovation ecosphere in Colorado, which is one of the fastest growing entrepreneurial communities in the United States. While our primary development team is rooted in Denver, we collaborate with a talented team across the United States, including engineers, physicians, and other experienced entrepreneur advisors. We have secured early adopters, as well as interest from several hospitals for participation in pilot studies with our technology.

Corvectra’s primary technology development focus at this time is in disrupting a $133 Bn US medical diagnostic market. Chief among the problems facing the medical device market includes a dire need for affordable access to preventative and critical care for millions of people in the broken US healthcare infrastructure, and billions of people globally. The realization that the company‘s talented team of physicists, engineers, physicians could be brought to bear on the global healthcare crisis by solving unmet needs in diagnostic triage medicine led the Corvectra team on a seven month intense customer development and research campaign of this multi-sided market in 2014. The insights gained from talking to frustrated physicians, nurses, clinic owners, group purchasing organizations, and to patients themselves, led to a sharp focus on the development of non-invasive biosensing technology to rapidly and affordably provide healthcare workers with actionable information on biometrics critical to physicians making life or death decisions. Corvectra’s solution comes in the form of a diagnostic platform called Cortemis™, which is designed to extract a user-designated panel of blood analytes using only light applied to the skin.

The Problem

Blood contains an incredible amount of information. When an ambulance arrives at the scene of an accident, or a patient arrives in the emergency room or an urgent care outpatient clinic, or when a newborn is placed in the neonatal intensive care unit, there is a common set of diagnostic tests that may be run. This panel may be comprised of a CBC that includes hematocrit and hemoglobin, a white blood cell test, electrolytes and metabolic panel, urinalysis, and an arterial blood gas panel.

The $3 Trillion US healthcare system notoriously suffers from high cost, frustrating delays, and inadequate diagnosis and treatment, from which this critical panel of tests is not immune. In fact, Corvectra’s customer discovery campaign highlighted through interviews with healthcare providers that the time, cost, and for many outpatient urgent care cases – the complexity and logistics, of obtaining these critical diagnostic tests delay or altogether prevent many of them from being performed. As a result, the best case is that treating physicians operate with little information, and at worst this problem costs lives. Currently popular digital healthcare technologies, including wearables, address only limited consumer applications that the physicians we interviewed agree are more for the “Worried Well,” and not suitable for deployment in triage and trauma care when life hangs in the balance. The opportunity to save lives by introducing real time, affordable, non-invasive technology is here and now.

The Solution

Corvectra has developed Cortemis™, a patent-pending non-invasive biosensing point of care diagnostic device requiring minimal training that is designed to allow healthcare providers to non-invasively obtain blood analytes such as hemoglobin, blood gases, and electrolytes in real time, at one-fifth of the cost of leading diagnostic devices on the market. What makes Cortemis™ unique is a patent-pending biosensing optical platform with no market equal, that extracts painless transcutaneous measurement of blood analytes from an arterial site using only light applied to the skin, and which negates the signal processing issues that have plagued would-be competitors, such as motion artifact, melanin concentration, collagen and elastin. Using advanced computational models, a chemical fingerprint of the contents of the patient’s blood is obtained and may be compared to clinical standards such as the I-stat. Cortemis™ is designed around a platform-independent interface with HIPPA compliant encryption for secure data access anywhere.

Regulatory and Marketing Disclaimer: Corvectra has started down a regulatory pathway for Cortemis™ with our CRO and we are in the planning stages of a human pilot study with a clinical trial sponsor that will validate our technology in human patients. After this human pilot study, Corvectra plans to seek FDA approval of Cortemis™, but at this time Cortemis™ is not FDA approved to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition in human patients. The statements made on this website about Cortemis™ are intended to illustrate features we have designed into our pre-clinical technology model, which we have validated through feasibility studies including self-funded pre-clinical animal studies, as well as bench top tests with tissue models and NIST traceable calibration sources.

Competitive Advantages

How can a company differentiate itself in a sea of wearables and point-of-care (POC) diagnostic devices, which many inaccurately might call a crowded digital health market? Simple. Our customer development interviews with actual healthcare providers indicated that the most popular digital health technology touted as a panacea for personalized medicine tends to serve primarily a population that is becoming known as the “Worried Well.” These personalized digital health devices are certainly useful for consumer data tracking and preventative health optimization, but they do nothing to meet the dire need for rapid, accurate, affordable clinical diagnostics in triage and trauma use cases that are being met by no more than a handful of innovative companies globally. Addressing this opportunity gap is the promise of the Cortemis™ system, pioneered by a team of physicists, rocket scientists, biomedical engineers, and physicians all working together toward the goal of turning the Founder’s early aerospace technology into a life science instrument like nothing on the market.Market Opportunity

Basic and clinical care service in the U.S. is a $618 Billion industry, while the U.S. Medical Device industry is $133 Billion. Corvectra will introduce the Cortemis™ system as the first in a line of biosensing IP to address critical care market needs for segments including hospital ICUs, NICUs, and ERs, after which we will be able to tap into additional market segments including EMS services, respiratory care, and outpatient clinical services. We have identified approximately 700 US hospitals and clinics within our launch market, many of which have expressed pre-order interest. Once we have successfully deployed the Cortemis™ system into our launch markets, we have an additional 6 patentable sources of technology that will address market-validated demand in sectors ranging from outpatient diagnostic services to environmental monitoring and homeland security.Advisory Board

Our advisors span the gamut from computing technology to space science, manufacturing, and microbiology to med tech. While our core team was built upon a foundation in physics and engineering, we have attracted team talent and trusted industry experts that span biomedical device development and regulatory experience, as well as entrepreneurship and innovation in med tech.

Innosphere, an advanced technology-centered startup incubator is working with Corvectra on business development, risk mitigation, customer discovery, and strategic resources so that we may leverage the exponential growth of Colorado’s bioscience and aerospace infrastructure with our team and technology. Corvectra is proud to be a client company of Innosphere. Combined with our Silicon Valley roots, and Innosphere’s strategic connection to the market needs in Colorado, Corvectra is positioned to tap two of the highest growth potential states in the US for biotech and aerospace.

TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs)is a non-profit, global community welcoming entrepreneurs from all over the world. TiE believes in the power of ideas to change the face of entrepreneurship and growing business through five pillars; mentoring, networking, education, incubating and funding. TiE was founded in 1992 by a group of successful entrepreneurs and is currently the world’s largest entrepreneurial organization. Through TiE Rockies, based out of the Innovation Pavilion in the Denver Tech Center district, Corvectra has connected to mentors and advisors with business development, technology, and capital access subject matter expertise.

Florian Selch, Senior Technology Advisor; M.S. Molecular Biology. As a former NASA Ames project manager and research scientist, and the current CEO of an international logistics company, Florian provides Corvectra with guidance on team development, project management, and technology strategy.

Dr. Arlen Meyers, Senior Medical Advisor; MD, MBA. Dr. Meyers is a physician with University of Colorado at Denver’s Anschutz Medical Campus, and is the president of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs. He joined Corvectra because of his strong faith and support of bio-entrepreneurship, and to provide strategic and medical technology development support.

Marv Patterson, Operations and Innovation Advisor. Marv is the President of the Dileab Group, a Stanford instructor on innovation management, and a 20 year Hewlett-Packard engineering executive. He advised the Founder, Chris Melton, when Corvectra was just an aerospace startup in Palo Alto, and continues to bring the wealth of his experience to bear on some of the challenges in maintaining a position of leadership as a startup in today’s fiercely competitive technology markets.

Steve Fanchiu, Medical Technology Startup Advisor. Steve is a longtime advisor to medical startups, and is a former executive of Foxconn, Dupont, Optovue, and Genttix. Steve is passionate about the intersection of technology with healthcare access and growing patient needs for consumer tools to better manage their health.

Eugene Shteyn, IP Strategy Advisor. Eugene is a Stanford instructor on IP strategy and innovation, and former IP strategist and manager at Instaply, Hewlett-Packard, and scientist at Philips. Eugene has provided Corvectra with valuable insight into the strategic technology landscape of what patients really need vs. a market flooded with innumerable devices and applications.